Towards a Feminist Comedy

Shannon Hengen Towards a Feminist Comedy I o profane, through laughter, the forbidding symbols of divine and political power is to expose them as merely symbols, and thus to throw into doubt the tragic and sacrificial world-view which they enshrine (91)," writes Anthony Gash in his discussion of the carnivalesque. What I propose is that Ann-Marie MacDonald's recent dramatic work, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), opens Canadian feminist comedy to exactly such profaning through laughter which Gash associates with the potential for real social or political change. Before showing how GD (GJ) partakes of elements of the comic carnivalesque I will summarize the larger theoretical debate concerning comedy's power to transform audiences. While throwing into doubt the tragic world-view has always been comedy's goal, theorists have disagreed on the permanence of the overthrow. One side would argue that comedy is ultimately a conservative force allowing the audience to play with freedom for a time, but then ensuring that the status quo is restored at play's end, thereby acting as a kind of purgation of chaos (Eco, Cook, Dolan, Nelson); the other side asserts that comedy revives and excites revolutionary forces that lead not only to social renewal on stage, but also to an awakening of subversive energies in the audience (Bakhtin, Frye, Turner, Santayana). Absent from these theoretical speculations is discussion of plot, characterization, and the audience's accompanying emotional responses, the very starting points of the Aristotelian study of tragedy still underlying traditional scholarly analyses of that genre. By giving attention to the effects of plot and characterization, we can propose that dramatic comedy is sometimes 97 MacDonald conservative and sometimes radical in its cultural work, depending upon what happens in each play, to whom, and how the audience responds. Surely a play like Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) in which an English professor named Constance overcomes her diffidence and begins to show both sexual and professional power has a different meaning from a play in which an English professor named Constance gives in to her diffidence and quits her job, marrying a nice man (perhaps a dentist), and starting a family (in Mississauga). And if the English professor is, say, aboriginal or disabled or lesbian, certainly the play's meaning is altered yet again. I suggest that plays in which marginalized women gain success and audience empathy explicitly through allying with other women to ridicule and best powerful figures in the mainstream, and that create a joyful mood, might form a sound basis for evaluating the radical potential of Canadian women's comedy; clearly, the borrowed theories noted above, however progressive or sophisticated, have not considered such plays. But even to such drama specialists as Erik MacDonald, Elin Diamond, and Kate Lushington who do consider women's plays, my discussion of a Canadian feminist carnivalesque represents something new. I can most clearly locate my approach within existing theory with reference to the kind of eclecticism Sue-Ellen Case advocates in her Feminism and Theatre: For theatre, the basic theoretical project for feminism could be termed a 'new poetics,' borrowing the notion from Aristotle's Poetics. New feminist theory would abandon the traditional patriarchal values embedded in prior notions of form, practice and audience response in order to construct new critical models and methodologies for the drama that would accommodate the presence of women in the art, support their liberation from the cultural fictions of the female gender and deconstruct the valorisation of the male gender. In pursuit of these objectives, feminist dramatic theory would borrow freely . .. (114-115) But in promoting a specific structure for plays I am working against the lat- est trends of postmodernist theatre as described by Erik MacDonald in his Theater at the Margins: "the post-structured stage remains on the selvage of continual disappearance, for, in resisting its own institutionality, it pulls the rug out from under the foundations, as it were, of aesthetic, or canon- forming, processes" (174). Canon-forming of another kind, for example dis- covering such a new genre as that ably described by Elin Diamond as "hysterical realism" (68), seems closer to my project although the play I dis- cuss would perhaps appear—because of its accessibility—too close to the familiar realist-naturalist tradition. 98 In supporting a popular feminist theatre that borrows from the comic carnivalesque as does GD (GJ), I look forward to a success for feminist theatre like that of its triumphant heroines. My very definition of popular feminist comedy, however, strikes Kate Lushington—Artistic Director of Toronto's Nightwood Theatre (discussed below) from 1988 to 1994—as problematic: Getting there [to material success] you have to do the male thing, the white thing, and then where is your community? Where are you? The price is huge for that kind of material success. Fewer and fewer people are making it; we have an alien- ated left. That's the problem with material success, (personal interview 1993) The larger community, however, has less difficulty with material success and that community must be hailed by comedy in order to be moved and changed by it. Hence my tolerance for a play which because popular may strike other drama specialists as conventional, but which in fact through the power of comic inversion may both attract and renew its audiences. Ann-Marie MacDonald's comedy about an English professor named Constance qualifies as feminist comedy by my definition above because the white, middle-class Constance is at least slightly marginalized (eccentric, probably brilliant) and yet she stirs audience empathy. To the extent that Constance is mocked, the play undermines its radical potential, but more importantly to the extent that Constance herself learns through other women to laugh at her oppressors and so reclaim her power, providing hopeful closure, the play shows progressive force. Theorists (Freud, Purdie) have posited that laughter provides us with at least a momentary sense of superiority over the person or thing being laughed at, and so critical com- mentary upon who laughs at what or whom in women's comedy such as GD (GJ) and its audiences, and who seems to gain by the laughter, should pro- vide a key to the play's potential as a power for or against cultural change. I have chosen MacDonald's comedy as a sample not only because of its popu- larity before and since the national tour in 1990— Ottawa, Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto (see reviews by Crook, Coulbourn, Hunt, Branswell, Friedlander, Charles, Dykk, Bemrose, Nicholls, Crew, and Conlogue)—but also because of the theatre which first produced it, Toronto's Nightwood Theatre, whose consistent success at promoting feminist comedy merits fur- ther attention. The paper will not attempt to survey Canadian feminist comedy, or the theatres that produce it, but rather to use GD (GJ) and Nightwood as representative examples of where Canadian women's most promising dramatic comedy now stands. 99 MacDonald Some theories of feminist dramatic comedy have studied alternative happy endings of plays, thereby supplying that firm basis in plot absent in theories of mainstream comedy. Susan Carlson in her responsible treatment of the history of dramatic comic theory, including that of contemporary British feminists, writes that overall "women's theatre has irrevocably been established as communal," and "these communities intensify women's ten- dency to write plays grounded in joy" (284-285). The recent tradition of feminist comedy in England, as in Canada, thus seems closely linked to the collaborative methods of feminist theatre. Collaborative methods of course pertain to the North American alternative theatre movement in general, not just to women's alternative theatre (see Johnston, Fraticelli). But in a short article updating statistics from Rina Fraticelli's report on the status of women in the Canadian theatre, Bronwyn Drainie suggests that women's alternative theatre now provides the kind of cultural leaven that Canadian nationalist alternative theatre provided twenty years ago. Although Ann-Marie MacDonald's play, her first solo creation, takes feminist comedy in a new direction in terms of its individual authorship, its vision remains hopeful in that—significantly—the central female figure tri- umphs. "[I]t is such positive vision," Carlson writes, "that distinguishes the women's work [from contemporary male comedies rooted in despair], even more basically than the formal innovations or the novel subject matter. In other words, the difference in women's comedy depends on optimism" (307). Regina Barreca corroborates Carlson's theory that feminist comedi- ans' independence from the established dramatic tradition emerges in part through the endings of their plays, observing that the "endings of comic works by women writers do not, ultimately, reproduce the expected hierarchies, or if they do it is often with a sense of dislocation even about the hap- piest ending" (1988,12). Such "dislocation" seems inevitable as hierarchies are overturned and the comic carnivalesque does its usual work. Carlson sees several ways in which contemporary British feminist comedy eludes audiences' expectations about the return to order which endings in conventional comedy have promised. The group protagonist, for example, challenges the audience's

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